In reaction to Apple’s recent implementation of in-app store restrictions, Read Write Web reports, a number of e-reader developers have resorted to building HTML5 applications. These applications are essentially self-contained chunks of HTML code that can download themselves directly into your HTML5-capable device for offline use—and since they aren’t delivered through Apple’s app store, they can contain whatever in-app purchase options the developer wants. One such app is the Financial Times reader, which launched its HTML5 app last month. And today Kobo announced that it was developing an HTML5 e-reader in order to move toward being an “open...

Paul linked to a positive Project Gutenberg review of Ibis Reader a few months ago, but it first came to my direct attention when I tried out Jolicloud and discovered what it was: a web-based EPUB reader. It was an interesting idea, I thought, but I wasn’t sure what it was really good for. But a couple of days ago, my perspective changed. One of the great things about Baen Webscriptions and the Free Library is that they allow people who have access to Baen e-books to read them on-line as well as download them. Not too many other...

ReadWriteWeb has a report on Jolicloud, a cloud-based spinoff of Ubuntu with a user interface based on Chromium (the development version of the Google Chrome browser) and HTML5. This zippy little Linux OS is mainly meant for running on Intel-based netbooks and tablets, but today dropped an update that will make it usable on computers as much as ten years old. While this may not be directly related to e-books, anything that makes older hardware more usable means it could be more easily used for educational purposes by the needy—purposes such as reading e-books. I’ve been playing with Jolicloud...

ZDNet's Tech Broiler, by Jason Perlow, has a really good review of all the major ereaders for the iPad: iBooks, Kindle, Stanza, eReader, Kobo Reader, Ibis Reader and vBookz. For once it is clear that the reviewer actually knows whereof he speaks. Good job! Anybody who is new to this space should take a look at this. Here's something that I didn't know that I found in the iBooks portion of the review: Unfortunately, iBooks doesn’t scale very well as the size of your EPUB library increases. While iBooks is perfectly fine for a few dozen or perhaps...

Ibis Reader has now joined the "big guys" with a number of improvements that make it a direct competitor. Here's the list: Readers can now select any of the on-board fonts (omitting some unsuitable decorative fonts for clarity). Turning pages uses a more reliable method. It’s now much harder to accidentally switch pages by brushing the screen. All visual effects now use CSS3. On iPhones and iPads these will appear to be much smoother than before. Many menus are on the iPad are now drop-downs, providing a better overall view of the application. Regarding fonts, they say: On the iPad, we’ve converted the font...

Threepress Consulting has gotten their Ibis Reader ready for the iPad. According to them if you have access to the iPad simulator you can run the Ibis Reader on it. They have a lot of technical information on their blog page and also some screenshots. Here's one: ...

Liza Daly reports this in a blog post. According to her the changes are full position syncing across all clients, a new "no distractions" mode that gets rid of the screen color, the ability to make font face and size preferences in both the table of contents view and the reading mode, the ability to adjust width of the text by dragging the right margin, and, among other small fixes, the ability to export the current book to Stanza or Aldiko if you are on an iPhone/Touch or Android. Full information and download links here. ...

CNet has an article about Smartwords, an idea from start-up company Wordnik that sounds terrific but sure seems hard to describe succinctly. As Smartwords’s website puts it: Smartwords is a lightweight, easy-to-use standard for retrieving and publishing real-time, contextually-aware information about words. It took reading through the CNet article a couple of times to figure out that it might better be described as “an integrated dictionary on steroids.” Existing e-book apps with dictionary support (such as eReader) are largely limited to clicking on a single word to get a definition. Wordnik wants...

From their blog: We’re starting to share early betas of the Ibis Reader mobile UI for iPhones, Nexus Ones, and other Android devices with a limited group of testers. If you’re interested in joining the beta program and testing on other phones, tablets, and laptops, please email info@ibisreader.com. You may be asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement. More info on our upcoming ereader is available in our announcement post. The reader will support iPhone OS, Android and Palm webOS and will support Epub. It will use the Bookserver ecosystem from the Internet Archive. Technorati Tags: e-book, e-books, ebook, ebooks, iPhone, Paul Biba, Android, Palm,...